While improved American counterterrorism efforts have made attacks on the U.S. much less likely, and the killing of key figures—most importantly, Osama bin Laden—has severely disrupted al-Qaeda, the organization is far from extinguished. Crucial to its continued success are its relations with Iran and the Taliban, as Thomas Joscelyn writes:

When we look at the organization as a whole, it quickly becomes apparent that al-Qaeda has many thousands of men around the globe. Indeed, al-Qaeda is waging jihad in far more countries today than it was on 9/11, with loyalists fighting everywhere from West Africa, through North and East Africa, into the heart of the Middle East and into South Asia. . . .

The Obama administration’s Treasury and State Departments revealed in 2011 that al-Qaeda’s Iran-based network serves as the organization’s “core pipeline through which” it “moves money, facilitators, and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia.” This pipeline operates under an “agreement” between al-Qaeda and the Iranian government. In the years since the Obama administration first exposed this “secret deal,” the U.S. government has revealed additional details about other al-Qaeda leaders operating inside Iran, including “new-generation” figures who were groomed to replace their fallen comrades. . . .

Al-Qaeda [also] continues to have a significant presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and some senior managers are operating in those two countries. One of the principal reasons the group has been able to weather the America-led counterterrorism storm in South Asia is its relationship with the Taliban. This is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of al-Qaeda’s operations. . . .

The U.S. and its allies have failed to defeat al-Qaeda. The organization has survived multiple challenges. . . . From Afghanistan to West Africa, al-Qaeda loyalists are attempting to build their own caliphate. . . . Al-Qaeda’s leadership has [meanwhile] deprioritized professional attacks on the West. The group hasn’t attempted to carry out a mass casualty attack in the U.S. or Europe in years. But that could change at any time. It would then be up to America’s and Europe’s formidable defenses to stop them.

To Peter Berkowitz, the rot in American institutions of higher learning exposed by Tuesday’s hearings resembles a disease that in its early stages was easy to cure but difficult to diagnose, and now is so advanced that it is easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. Recent analyses of these problems have now at last made it to the pages of the New York Times but are, he writes, “tardy by several decades,” and their suggested remedies woefully inadequate:

They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs. And they overlook the mainstream media’s complicity in largely ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing repeated warnings extending back a quarter century and more—largely, but not exclusively, from conservatives—that our universities undermine the public interest by attacking free speech, eviscerating due process, and hollowing out and politicizing the curriculum.

The remedy, Berkowitz argues, would be turning universities into places that cultivate, encourage, and teach freedom of thought and speech. But doing so seems unlikely:

Having undermined respect for others and the art of listening by presiding over—or silently acquiescing in—the curtailment of dissenting speech for more than a generation, the current crop of administrators and professors seems ill-suited to fashion and implement free-speech training. Moreover, free speech is best learned not by didactic lectures and seminars but by practicing it in the reasoned consideration of competing ideas with those capable of challenging one’s assumptions and arguments. But where are the professors who can lead such conversations? Which faculty members remain capable of understanding their side of the argument because they understand the other side?